The company of mercenaries russian Wagner has stopped recruiting inmates to fight in Ukraine together with the Russian Army, declared today its founder, the businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin.
“Yes, indeed it is so. Recruitment of inmates by the private military company Wagner has been fully completed”, Prigozhin stated in a comment posted on his channel Telegram.
The businessman, considered close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putinthus answered a question from a Russian media outlet, which pointed out that many prisoners write that Wagner has not carried out recruitment for more than a month in penalties.
“All obligations to those who currently work for us are met,” he stressed.
Prigozhin has recruited thousands of prisoners, 35,000according to Rus Siadiaschian organization that watches over the rights of prisoners to fight in Ukraine, to whom it promised pardons.
According to Olga Romanova, director of the NGO Russia Behind Bars, they were 50,000 prisoners recruited by the Wagner Group in Russian jails to fight in Ukraine. Of these, 40,000 are dead or missingand only 10,000 were still fighting Putin’s invasion.
“Our data shows that, at the end of December, between 42,000 and 43,000 inmates had been recruited. By now, it’s probably over 50,000. Of that number, 10,000 are now fighting on the front lines, because the rest have been killed or wounded, or gone AWOL, or deserted, or surrendered,” he said. Olga Romanova, in a video posted on the YouTube channel My Russian Rights (My Russian rights).
Romanova added that desertion has been a problem for the wagner group since last autumn. Some of the deserters return to Russia fully armed. Last December, for example, an armed Wagner defector opened fire on local police officers in Rostov.
The specialist said that Prigozhin it does not monitor soldiers who disappear in combat for different reasons, leaving them for dead indiscriminately.
(With information from EFE)
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Source-www.infobae.com